The little girl in me &nd The Taming, poems by Adriana DiGennaro

The little girl in me refuses
To go to bed
She won’t put on her sensible
Sweater
Or even a pair of pants
She wants to wear her party clothes
Or maybe she’s not a little girl at all
But a preteen getting into all the
Sparkling dark things
Parents wish they could protect
Their kids from,
That’s inside me, the
Artistic material of the notes
That a girl might pass
To her friend behind her in class
Between giggles
I am so often the cigarette
She hides in her pocketbook
Still smelling like
Her grandmother’s purse from where she stole it,
Half-smoked and pungent, the end reddened
With a sheer pink bruise
The size of her pursed lips.

It’s the wild animals who catch eyes,
particularly mine,
I hadn’t even looked yet
when he kissed my hand hello.
There was no edge, though.

Now he has cut an edge out
for me. I’m thrown
by his words and ways
now the precipice
is miles overhead
marking the distance
I’ve dropped.
It resembles the line
of his impossibly broad shoulders,
that place I took off from,
when first I held him,
clutching at his long limbs,
galloping at ground level
under late-day skies.

I want to go back to the fear of falling
before the fall itself.
The quick thrill that shuts the eyes.
The feeling of maybe pervading.
The beginning of the game.
The taming.